Matrescence is leadership development. The sector just hasn’t noticed.

There’s a list that circulates endlessly through charity sector leadership development circles. You’ve seen it. The qualities “we need more of”: leaders who can sit with uncertainty without reaching for false certainty. Leaders who think beyond the next funding cycle. Leaders who can hold multiple stakeholders’ needs in genuine tension rather than just talking about it. Leaders who’ve made peace with the fact that control is largely a story we tell ourselves.

I’ve been back at work for a while now. And what I keep noticing, in the gap between the leadership development industry and the reality of my own transition, is that matrescence (the profound psychological and identity shift that accompanies becoming a mother) has quietly handed me most of that list.

Not all at once, and not without cost, mind you.

Sitting with uncertainty is something you learn when you genuinely cannot predict what the next hour will bring, let alone the next year. Thinking in longer time horizons becomes instinctive when you’re suddenly responsible for a person who will live in a world you won’t see. Holding multiple people’s needs simultaneously isn’t a competency framework tick-box; it’s a daily negotiation you learn to do in real time, often while simultaneously managing your own hunger, your inbox, and a Zoom call.

And as for control: you learn quickly that it was always mostly an illusion. Motherhood just stops you pretending otherwise.

I want to be clear: I’m not romanticising any of this. Matrescence is also disorienting, painful, and frequently invisible. The sector doesn’t tend to talk about the structural costs of it: the compounded professional precarity, the narrowed options, the informal penalties for being perceived as “less available.” Those are real, and they matter enormously.

But there’s a particular kind of waste that I think we need to name more honestly. The charity sector consistently invests in leadership development to build exactly the qualities that caregiving develops, and then treats the people who’ve been through that development process as career-interrupted, in need of catching up, a little less reliable.

We bring them back to the role they left rather than the leaders they’ve become.

I’ve spent a lot of time in training rooms helping senior charity leaders develop adaptive thinking, tolerance for ambiguity, and systemic perspective. I’ve also sat with a small human at 3am learning those things in a very different way. The sector can’t afford to keep treating one of those as development and the other as absence.

What would it look like if we took matrescence seriously as a leadership experience, not a break from the work, but part of it?